Viewing German Win in Cologne

For me, a great Wednesday in Germany is just ending at 1:15 Thursday morning. For many Germans, Wednesday night still has a long way to go.

The Touristy Stuff

This morning we made a day trip by train from our current base in Essen down to Cologne, because the Let’s Go travel book said it’s a great town to check out. It was obvious upon leaving the train station that Cologne has a certain energy that we haven’t seen yet in Essen. Cologne is feels like one of those crossroad cities that attracts tons of visitors, and a lot of them young and full of energy. About every other person in the city was wearing their national colors somewhere on their body, be it from Germany, France, USA, Switzerland, or Mexico (there are an impressive number of Mexicans here).

Lark Howorth

This is the really big pitcher with a spigot at the bottom, it has a

name but we never got it.

It has a frighteningly large cathedral called them Dom, and it sits right on the Rhein River, which we toured by boat for a relaxing hour. It has a very nice Roman architecture museum, with a special display about the Roman Colosseum; and an art museum with a nice exhibition of Salvador Dali works. Other than that, I’ll just say Cologne is a lively city that feels like you’d imagine a German town to be, and that anyone should visit if they ever make it to Germany–but further details will be available in your local guidebook, rather than your World Cup FanBlog.

The Soccer Stuff

Today we saw the first game of the day, Spain vs. Ukraine, on the patio of an outdoor pub. You know the score was 4-0 by now, so Ukraine is now the only team in the tournament to have a worse goal differential than the United States. Game 2, between Saudi Arabia and Tunisia on account of the boat ride on the Rhein, and also because we fell asleep in the grassy park area right next to the river where everybody in the city seems to congregate. And it turns out Tunisia’s injury-time game-tying goal killed my would-be-winner 3-to-1 longshot bet I made in Vegas last month.

Lark Howorth

This is the plank that they can carry a lot of beers at once with.

The last game of the night was obviously the highlight: Germany vs. Poland. As the day wore on toward the 9:00 p.m. kickoff, the thousands of people milling about the streets grew not only in number, but in the percentage carrying German colors. Poles were actually fairly scarce. Between 8:00 and 9:00, like in a game of musical chairs, every one of these pedestrians found a bar or restaurant that had an empty seat to accommodate them, and a TV to entertain them. Fortunately, each the bars, which are tightly clustered together by the dozens in an area in which automobiles are prohibited, had at least one TV. Tonight, any business without a television might as well have closed up for the night.

We picked a nice spot on the patio of one of these bars (sense a pattern here on this trip?) where we could see two TVs pretty well. The place was packed, and the waitstaff could barely keep up with all the beer orders they were taking. Fortunately, the Germans have invented a couple of devices to make beer service easier for them. One is a long plank that holds at least 13 glasses of brew; another is a pitcher like I’ve never seen before, probably 5 feet tall and holding who knows how many liters.

As you can imagine, singing an chanting continued throughout the game among the fans on our block, which we estimated to be around 1000, even when a light rain started falling. The tension seemed to pick up as the game moved past the 75th minute or so. With the flurry of attacks at the end, the place just about exploded when the Germans finally scored the game winning goal.

We meandered a bit after the game getting back to the station for our 11:30 train back to Essen, just enough to see the beginning of the craziness in Germany. I’ve seen the host country win games in Italy, France, Korea, and now Germany. Every time, it’s very special to see a whole country’s emotions lifted up, if only for those few hours before they start worrying about the next opponent.